There are some women born with the desire and heart to welcome motherhood with open arms. Then there are other women, like me, who write letters to their “older-selves” while in college to remind their future-selves why they don’t want to have kids. My letter included a line about a hormonal baby-plague that would hit me in my thirties and encouraged me to be strong and stay on course. The wisdom of a third year undergrad psychology student wasn’t lost on this old-timer and her efforts did delay my motherhood ambitions until the age of 34. In the end, love, hormones or a change of heart made my husband and me expectant parents. It was this lack-luster start to parenthood that will help explain why I’m pregnant for the first time to our second baby.
See, technically, our first baby is our three year old seven pound Yorkshire terrier, who we brought home and immediately started calling “baby-dog” as a fun way to remind family and friends to stop asking us when we plan to start our family. We had started our family – the three amigos which ended with baby-dog. Flash-forward three years and several slices of humble pie later, our friends and family were correct – we were wrong – and our family is literally growing once again. This time we’re planning on taking home a baby of the homosapien persuasion.
Dog lovers will relate to this story and non-dog lovers might think it is silly; but as my husband and I draw near the end of our pregnancy and closer to parenthood, our thoughts have turned to the abstract and our desire to raise a well adjusted child. As we struggle to define our future-selves as parents, we have been surprised to see how much our little baby-dog has taught us about being better parents. It seems children are falling victim to obesity, hyper-activity, excess television and other related “ills” that doctors and scientist warn are harming our kids. Most recently we have been reading about the potential dangers of excessive video game playing. The answer might seem simple, just don’t let your kids have access to video games. Which would be simple if our baby didn’t actually live in our house, since we currently own a Wii, an Xbox 360, countless (mostly violent) video games, a Nintendo DS, an old handheld Play Station, an old Nintendo game system, an iPad with lots of games, our iPhones with lots of games, and two computers.
It gets better …
Over the last three years my husband, my brother and I have taken a whole day off work to stay home and play Gears of War every time a newer version came out – seriously, a whole day of playing nothing but a really violent video game. So much for limited exposure. Then our next defense would be to simply draw a hard-line and say “no”. It worked to keep us both off drugs, I’m sure that approach will work and be super simple. And that is where baby dog comes into the picture.
Baby-dog is a simple dog with two real loves – play and chew sticks. When we are tired and don’t feel like playing, we simply have to give him a chew stick. This will keep him happy for hours letting us focus on things we want to do. The problem is that baby-dog will chew on the stick until it makes him sick. He literally has thrown-up and then kept chewing. So we both know for his own good that we must limit his access to chew sticks. He doesn’t understand this, and it is hard because once he has the chew stick he doesn’t want to let it go and when he doesn’t have the chew stick he wants it. There are times we fight the hard fight, but there are other times when we are simply too tired to fight and we give into his demands letting him hang on to it a little longer than we should. Then it hit us, this is why countless well meaning parents fall victim to the downfalls of letting their kids watch too much TV, eat too much junk-food and play too many video games. It is the struggle to find the balance between our wants and desires, with our kids wants and best interest.
As my husband and I realized that we are 100% in control of what our kid gets access too, we are also realizing that this control will be weakened by our own needs – alone time, running errands, having friends over, keeping the kid happy and quite, and I’m sure the list will go on and on. We don’t have it all figured out, but we do have a plan, we do have a strong desire, and we do have a baby-dog to practice on for our final three months of pregnancy. Poor guy … all he wants is to chew on his stick … but to us the “battle over the chew stick” will be fought as if our child’s future depends on it. Because it just might.
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Listen to PregTASTIC, Episode 50 for great advice on how to prepare your pet for the baby’s arrival.